Gunnar Birkerts – Practice Information

Next up was Gunnar Birkerts, who many of us had heard of but couldn’t recall any one building. Gunnar made sure this didn’t last. He started with a long-winded explanation of ‘organic systems’, his modernist dogmatic approach, but lost me in a conflated comparison between library statistics.

It soon became clear, but after an amusing reminder that ‘we are here’ in Scotland (with ref. to his map) and the following ‘You Scots have it made because you have images that are so known that you don’t have to look for them’. He proceeded to gesticulate a kilt, an unusual bagpipe style and golf! More bizarrely came an unusual termite mound of a section for his Riga Library.

Powww!! it becomes an astonishing sculptural dry ski slope plopped into a leafy city plot. The influence of working for Eero Saarinen is apparent. In a postnote, the Latvian ambassador said ‘we’re still twenty years ahead of the British Library in London!’ I somehow doubt it’s exterior is ahead of the unusual elevations of this building, to be awaited by Latvians! RIAS Convention 05.05.03

Gunnar was raised in Latvia but fled ahead of the advancing Russian army toward the end of the Second World War. He graduated from the Technische Hochschule, Stuttgart, Germany, in 1949. He came to the United States and worked initially for Perkins and Will, then for Eero Saarinen, and finally for Minoru Yamasaki before opening his own office in the Detroit suburbs.

He initially practiced in the partnership Birkerts and Straub; after that partnership broke up the firm became Gunnar Birkerts and Associates. The architecture firm received Honor Awards for its projects from the (national) American Institute of Architects in 1962, 1970, 1973, as well as numerous awards from the Michigan Society of Architects and the local chapter.

The architect was selected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1970, and a Fellow of the Latvian Architect Association in 1971. He is the recipient of numerous individual awards including a 1971 fellowship from the Graham Foundation, the Gold Medal of the Michigan Society of Architects in 1980, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1981, and the 1993 Michigan Artist of the Year award. source: Gunnar Birkerts architect